Catherine Coley

Catherine Coley is the former CEO of Binance.US, a subsidiary of Binance. She joined Binance in July 2019 after serving as head of XRP institutional liquidity at Ripple, a cross-border payment company. Prior to entering the cryptocurrency industry, she served as a foreign exchange analyst for Morgan Stanley in Hong Kong and London for five years, and from 2016 to 2017, she served as a foreign exchange advisor at Silicon Valley Bank. In 2020, Coley was named to the Fortune 40 Under 40 in Finance list.

Catherine Coley, CEO of Binance.US Talks About New U.S. Crypto Exchange (2020)

Catherine Coley was the CEO of Binance.US from July 2019 to April 2021, when she abruptly left the company and went silent. Though previously active on Twitter, her last tweet was April 19, 2021, and a new CEO of Binance.US was announced the next day, April 20, 2021, without any mention of Coley or why she left. Her departure and continued silence have remained a mystery; however, there are reports of her communicating through intermediaries and legal representatives and attending events since that time. Reuters reported in March 2023 that in 2020, Coley had been unaware that Binance had secret access to Binance.US's bank accounts and had transferred large sums of money from an account to a trading firm managed by Chinese Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao. At the time, Catherine Coley wrote to a Binance finance executive in late 2020 asking for an explanation for the transfers, calling them "unexpected" and saying "no one mentioned them." Over the first three months of 2021 prior to her abrupt departure, more than $400 million was transferred from the Binance.US account at California-based Silvergate Bank.

Catherine Coley earned a bachelor of science in international business and Asian studies from the Univeristy of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School. She was a GLOBE Scholar, allowing her to earn her degree across three schools— UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School, Copenhagen Business School, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong—and focus on corporate strategy, globalization, and entrepreneurship. She was also a SEAS scholar in political science and government at the National University of Singapore. She attended Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Virginia.